Aegis woke slowly.
Not because he was tired—but because his body no longer rushed to meet consciousness. Every breath felt deliberate, measured, as if something inside him was listening to the space between moments.
He lay still, eyes closed, and felt it.
The spatial compression.
No longer a foreign pressure humming beneath his skin, no longer an echo of pain or panic. It was… settled. Folded neatly into place, like a muscle he'd always had but never flexed.
When he opened his hand, the air above his palm dimmed slightly.
Space bent.
Not violently. Not visibly enough to draw attention. Just enough for him to know it was real.
So it's mine now, he thought.
Not borrowed. Not copied.
Integrated.
The understanding came with it—not in words, not in diagrams, but in certainty. The Living Law did not steal abilities. It did not mimic them imperfectly.
It completed them.
Anything that tried to end him became a solved problem. Anything that reached lethal intent was broken down, absorbed, and rewritten into survivability.
He didn't need to die for it to happen.
Death had just been the fastest teacher.
Aegis exhaled and let the distortion collapse. The room returned to normal, sterile and quiet. Machines still hummed around him, still pretending nothing had changed.
And that was the strangest part.
Nothing had—at least, not to anyone else.
They still saw an unawakened kid.
He swung his legs off the bed, flexing his fingers. His body responded instantly, perfectly, like it had been waiting for instructions all along. Somewhere deep beneath thought, the Catalog stirred—but he didn't descend into it this time.
He didn't need to.
He understood now.
The First Law had always been passive. Evolution did not command. It reacted. It waited for pressure, for extinction events, for necessity.
By inhabiting him, it had gained urgency.
By surviving death, he had become its proof.
Living Law, he thought.
Not a title.
A condition.
Footsteps approached outside the room.
The meeting did not go the way the authorities wanted.
It never did, when certainty failed them.
They sat across from him behind a translucent barrier—not to protect themselves, but to maintain the illusion of control. Three officers. Two analysts. One legal observer whose presence meant everything and nothing at once.
"We've reviewed all available data," the senior officer said. "And at this time, we cannot legally classify you as a Shifter."
Aegis nodded.
He already knew.
"However," the officer continued, "multiple eyewitness accounts and verified recordings show you surviving an attack that should have been fatal."
"I didn't do anything," Aegis said, calmly.
That wasn't a lie.
The analyst leaned forward. "We've scanned you seven times. No activation markers. No tier signatures. No latent pathways. You're clean."
Clean.
As if power were contamination.
The legal observer cleared her throat. "Under Human Rights Accord 3.1, you cannot be detained without demonstrable cause or classification."
The word detained hung in the air.
Containment had been discussed.
Aegis could feel it. Not through hearing, but through absence—through the options they weren't presenting anymore.
They wanted to hold him.
They couldn't justify it.
"We'll be monitoring you," the officer said. "Discreetly."
"I figured," Aegis replied.
Silence followed.
Then—
"You're free to go."
Just like that.
No apology.
No explanation.
They escorted him out of the facility under the pretense of medical discharge. Outside, the city stretched on, neon signage and reinforced architecture shaped by decades of genetic shifts and adaptive technology.
The world looked the same.
It wasn't.
As he stepped onto the sidewalk, Aegis felt it again—the subtle pull of possibility. Every passing Shifter was a walking library of potential. Every relic, every artifact, every power he hadn't yet touched existed as an unanswered question.
Don't, he told himself.
Not yet.
Public displays would invite attention. Attention would invite escalation. And escalation would force evolution to respond faster than he was ready for.
For now, he would be invisible.
A baseline human.
A nobody.
Behind him, in a secured room now scrubbed of his presence, an officer spoke quietly to another.
"He doesn't register," she said. "At all."
"That doesn't mean he's harmless," the other replied.
"No," she agreed. "It means we don't know what rules apply to him."
Somewhere far beyond the city, beyond even the planet, principles older than civilization remained aligned—watching a fixed point begin to move.
Aegis walked home alone.
And for the first time since he was seventeen, the world felt fragile—not because it was stronger than him…
…but because it wasn't.